Almalieque wrote:
What you are claiming as a possibility is ineffective for a malicious government to do...
Today. Maybe. As computing capabilities increase each year, it becomes more and more effective. If we'd had a conversation just 20 years ago about the ability of the NSA to collect even a tiny fraction of the data they collect from social media right now, you'd have made the same argument. Why spend all those resources collecting all that data? Um... Because as the cost for data storage and electronic transfer decreases, the value of simply slurping up all data you can get your hands on for later analysis and examination becomes greater. It literally is far more effective to grab all that data and run scans on the set looking for patterns that match whatever criteria you want.
Here's the thing though. Once you've collected that data, it's trivially easy to run any sort of search on it you want. So maybe officially you're looking for patterns of communication and behavior that pass some calculated threshold to justify closer inspection as a possible terrorist threat. But once you have the data, there's nothing at all preventing you from looking for behavior and communication patterns of politicians in the opposition party which may indicate they're having an affair, or don't actually go to church every Sunday as they claim, or that they consume alcohol when they claim to never touche the stuff, or any of a hundred different behaviors that aren't actually illegal in any way, but which might be embarrassing to the person or their employer (or constituents) if it were made public knowledge.
And again, that's what can be done right now using legal to obtain social media information. Which is problematic, but not a violation of privacy. If you put information out there that would allow someone to noodle out your secret furry fetish, then that's kinda on you, right? The only difference is that where once it would have required some dedicated investigator to follow you around with a camera and dig through your trash to find this stuff out, it can be discovered pretty quickly and automatically with pattern searches of a large enough data set. And it doesn't have to be targeted. You can just look for patterns and see who pops out, then decide what to do with the information.
Assuming most people are going to keep their "secret" stuff in secret places rather than public ones, I would hope you'd see the importance of making sure that hacking into people's home computers remain a restricted activity requiring due process to perform.
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...and would never be accepted by society.
Today. But if enough people actually do adopt the idea that "there's no privacy left anyway", then it's not unreasonable at all to suspect that future generations of citizens may not fight very hard to prevent arbitrary search of people's home computers. Again, I'm not talking about how things are now, but how they could be in the future if we aren't cautious.
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Even a script kiddie wouldn't do what you are proposing.
He would, if he could. It's the latter part that really is the sticking point here.